The first publication dedicated to the work of fashion illustrator and artist Kelly Beeman. Drawing her inspiration from lookbooks and catwalk shots, Kelly Beeman creates paintings that plunges the viewer into a fantasy world of rare delicacy, tinted with subtle references to interior design, architecture, music and literature.

In exotic gardens and cool swimming pools, at picnics, countryhouse and cocktail parties, at home on the sofa in moments of domestic intimacy or having tea with girlfriends—Kelly Beeman's elegant long-limbed figures lead their lives in dream apparel. But her beauties are not just models for the latest creations of big-name fashion designers. They are the protagonists of Beeman's profuse fantasy world brimming with childhood memories of Oklahoma and subtle nods and tributes to interior design, architecture, music and literature. Beeman's sources of inspiration are lookbooks and catwalk shots, from which she borrows an elaborately embroidered blouson, striped bell-bottoms, a lace Empire dress, a youthful biker jacket, playful silver earrings. She doesn't just produce fashion illustrations, she creates a meaningful world far beyond the confines of the fashion scene.
An autodidact, even as a child Beeman drew and painted and played piano with a passion, hence the recurrent sheet music and piano amongst the profusion of details in her pictures. After studying sociology at Hunter College in New York, Beeman worked for several years in Bolivia and Argentina. Her background in sociology informs how she thinks about her artwork: it's about the relationship between culture and fashion, a fundamental aspect of every society. “Dressing” her subjects is a way for Beeman to create characters, stories and cultural context and explore their significance in a world of self-display. She doesn't see herself as a social critic, however, but as both artist and fashion illustrator. Her inspirations, she says, are the New Objectivity, especially Christian Schad and Otto Dix, graphic works of the Vienna Secession as well as Classic and Byzantine art.

Kelly Beeman (born 1983, lives and works in New York City and Los Angeles) is an artist/fashion illustrator whose diverse body of work consists of simple, black and white contour drawings of nudes that evolve into fully-rendered watercolor and oil paintings portraying a vivid world composed of clothing, everyday objects, nature, and interior design.